The Anglo-Indian Architect Walter Sykes George (1881–1962): a Modernist Follower of Lutyens

[Lutyens's system of proportion] began the link between us, by a chance action of mine, within the first year of my meeting him. He would never discuss it. It was intensely personal to him. [… He once] spoke to a group of students. One asked ‘What is proportion?' and he answered ‘God'.

(Walter Sykes George to Hope Bagenal, January 1959)

Walter Sykes George (1881–1962) (Fig. 1) was a remarkable Anglo-Indian architect. Obituaries in Indian and British journals cast him as a ‘Renaissance' man: an artist, Byzantine archaeologist, architect, town planner, philosopher, historian, public intellectual, humanist, Modernist, even an Indian nationalist. He features prominently in one recent history of modern architecture in India, a rare accolade for an ‘Anglo-Indian' architect — an architect born in Britain who practised and lived for much of his life in India.